“BLAZING A PATH TO FREEDOM: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND
THEIR WHITE ALLIES IN BLEEDING KANSAS”
POSTED ONMARCH 7, 2011BY CONTRIBUTED
BY: KRISTEN TEGTMEIER OERTEL
In the following
article University of Tulsa historian Kristen T. Oertel describes the people
who like John Brown helped enslaved African Americans in Missouri escape to
freedom in Kansas Territory through the western Underground Railroad.
African Americans have valorized John
Brown throughout history, linking a white man to a pantheon of radical black
heroes from Frederick Douglass to Rosa Parks. Delegates to the second
Niagara Convention, future founders of the NAACP, designated “John Brown’s Day”
in 1906 to commemorate Brown’s sacrifices for black freedom, and monuments in
his honor have been erected in places like Western University, a now-defunct
historically black college in Kansas City, Kansas. While admiration of
Brown is well-placed, it often overpowers the acknowledgement of Brown’s black
and white allies and complicates an understanding of their role in his
abolitionism, particularly in Kansas, where Brown struck his first violent
blows against slavery.
Like the focus on Brown’s abolitionist
martyrdom, studies on “Bleeding Kansas” often fail to highlight the ways in
which black slaves and their white allies impacted the struggle between slavery
and freedom that ensued on the country’s western border in the 1850s.
After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, thousands of antislavery
settlers from Massachusetts, Ohio, and other northern states clashed with their
proslavery counterparts from Missouri, Kentucky, and Alabama as both groups
attempted to establish “popular sovereignty” in the region. Some of these
proslavery settlers arrived in Kansas with their slaves, hoping to expand the
peculiar institution into the far West and determined to defend their
“property” rights with strict slave codes and a proslavery territorial
constitution.
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